In 2026, accepting digital payments is no longer optional; it is the minimum standard customers expect from modern businesses. For example, many consumers no longer even carry physical credit cards, but rely on their smartphone to pay for goods.
In the era where cash is no longer rules the payment infrastructure, the underlying mechanisms responsible for processing these digital transactions aren’t given much thought. However, it’s exactly here that we can find better ways to support businesses.
Although consumers pay the same price for the product whether it’s cash, card or contactless, each digital transaction comes with an incremental cost, and these are adding up to a bigger bill for businesses as the popularity of cash declines.
A Nilson Report found that U.S. merchants paid a record $187 billion in card processing fees last year, growing nearly three times faster than actual card payment volume. These rising costs have seen credit card processing fees become the most-common payments challenge small businesses face.
Small businesses can’t afford to lose customers by turning away card payments and many feel they have no option but to accept the 3% processing fee that companies like Stripe charge to act as the middle ground between banks, customers and businesses.
However, an alternative payment processing solution called BAMS promises to offer a new forward.
An alternative to Stripe payment processing
The payments landscape today is dominated by names most merchants recognize: Stripe, Square, PayPal. But those platforms are payment facilitators (PayFacs) that operate under a fundamentally different license structure than BAMS, which is a registered Independent Sales Organization.
Dimitri Akhrin, founder and president at merchant services partner BAMS, explains that BAMS has been designed to support established businesses across industries that range from retail and hospitality to construction and manufacturing.
In fact, one of Akhrin’s earliest sign-ups was a commercial hauling company from Brooklyn that rented production equipment to major TV studios across New York. Although the company didn’t need to process a high volume of transactions each month on corporate credit cards, each one was more than $50,000 due to the nature of the business.
Given the extremely high cost of these purchases, the 3% fee typically charged by merchants would eat into revenue significantly.
By switching to BAMS, the savings came to over a thousand dollars a month, and came with guaranteed next-day funding.
Meanwhile, retail and hospitality businesses, which depend most heavily on card payments, disproportionately cite processing fees as a burden.
BAMS is aiming to help these owners realize that another solution is possible, including one that provides human support. “BAMS prefers to work with established businesses with lots of existing credit card revenue to be able to have intelligent conversations with business owners so they can optimize how much they pay – and to ensure they are working in the best environment possible,” Akhrin explained.
Human support is recognized as one of BAMS’ competitive advantages in the market.
Better rates with interchange-plus
In the face of rising costs and shrinking margins, some businesses are trying to recoup processing fees from customers. A 2025 study found that 34% of small businesses are now adding credit card surcharges, and this is eroding satisfaction rates as a result.
Although business owners need to ensure costs are covered, pushing merchant fees onto consumers is a short-sighted solution to a much larger problem.
“The new fad of charging customers a “service fee” of 3% or more has become commonplace with many businesses and it is creating a very negative experience for customers, which cannibalizes them coming back to certain locations that surcharge customers versus those that do not,” Akhrin suggests.
Instead of absorbing these exorbitant processing fees themselves or passing the costs onto customers, BAMS offers a third option:
BAMS uses interchange-plus, which means the merchant pays the actual interchange cost plus a transparent markup.
Smaller merchants often receive less competitive rates than larger ones who can negotiate favorable pricing structures thanks to the clout of how many sales they have. Meanwhile, those processing under $1 million a year will be pushed toward flat or tiered pricing structures, with effective rates landing between 3.2% and 4.0%.
BAMS helps to recoup the markup found between banks and affiliated processing companies.
“When BAMS sales representatives perform account reviews and see a statement of a bank, the team gets very excited because we almost always know that the savings will be significant and that the business owner will be happy when they see their proposal from BAMS.”
A better solution for digital payments
In 2026, business owners can’t avoid credit cards and digital payments. Whether it’s receiving payments for goods and services from customers, buying stocks and supplies or charging other businesses for an exchange of services, these transactions can easily rack up into tens of thousands of dollars each month.
This means the markup on processing fees can quickly snowball into a major loss of revenue for businesses.
Twenty years after Akhrin set up his first client appointments to explain BAMS to business owners, the dynamic remains unchanged. Today, Akhrin is finding merchants who have been overpaying, showing them a number, and asking whether they’d like to do something about it.
